Posts Tagged 'Apple'

Ok, so I am a bitobsessive about the new Microsoft ads, waiting for something interesting to happen. After they kicking Seinfeld out, Microsoft is jut reaping off the Get a Mac campaign. It starts with a Microsoft employee, who says that PC made into a stereotype, and show others who are using PC. Back to lame kingdom.

For two years Apple is bashing Microsoft with their clever “Get a Mac” campaign:

Microsoft’s image, already problematic, already under attack for their failing Vista operating system, took a beating without an adequate response. But now, finally, the Redmond giant woke up to strike back. So they took an amazing creative company, and decided to get Bill Gates and Jerry Seinfeld together on screen to show that Microsoft is not that bad. Doesn’t matter that Seinfeld show ended ten years ago. Doesn’t matter that in all of its season, one can clearly see a Mac in the Jerry’s living room.

Jerry, Are you nuts???

Nothing will stop the Redmond giant from spending $300M on a campaign to save its dignity – and here is the result:

If you are asking yourself “what was that?” youarenot the only ones. WHAT WAS THAT???

It is just sad. I have a lot of respect for Crispin Porter and Bogusky, and they are one of the most innovative and creative guys out there. But what we see here is another round where Apple gets the upper hand.

Last weekend Apple released two important updates: iPhone 3G hit the stores, and iPhone 2.0 version software update was released. In a futile effort to limit iPhone grey market, iPhone 3G activation process was changed to include in store activation by AT&T or Apple representatives. As everyone (besides Apple apparently) feared, that process didn’t work that well. Some early shoppers had to wait for couple of hours before in-store activation succeeded, some were sent home to continue activation through iTunes, just to find the activation server down. Twitter and FriendFeed were full of horror stories about this process.

However, this is not the whole, or even the important story. The important story is the unfulfilled promise of MobileMe, the new .mac service from Apple. The service, dubbed by Apple as “Exchange for the rest of us”, supposed to automatically and instantly synchonize contacts and calendar entries between laptops, iPhones, iPod Touch and the web. Guess what? This insanely expensive service just doesn’t fulfill it promise. While web and mobile device sync works like a charm, desktop applications are synched between once to four times an hour. That means that if you add a meeting to your laptop calendar, and then close it, it won’t be synched with either web or iPhone/iPod. This point made some of MacRomurs readers pretty angry. These discrepancies are major enough to challenge even the most devoted Macheads.

So what did we learn today? First we learned that Apple, with all its glory, screws up once in a while. The shining armor just got a dent. Not clear if it will become a hole, but it is certainly a dent. Second, it is a reminder that at the end of the day, Apple makes software and hardware, not divine entities. Yes, they are much better than Microsoft’s product, in design, look and feel and overall user experience, but they are still, you know, computer stuff, that don’t always work.

As for me – I just hope that this is a mishap from Apple direction, and not a slippery slop towards Microsoft’s product’s level…